A Violent Outlook is Easy to Find

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor, is a story about a self-righteous woman known as “The Grandmother,” her son Bailey, and his family. None of the characters are made particularly lovable, but they are all believable as they set out on a road trip to Florida for a family vacation. Along the way, partially due to the Grandmother’s senility and obstinacy, the car overturns on a dusty back road, leaving the family injured and stranded. Finding them there is an escaped convict called “The Misfit,” whose gang gradually executes the family members while he and the Grandmother discuss redemption. The story ends after the Misfit shoots and kills the Grandmother, remarking of her attitude for the last moments of her life that “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

           

This story portrays the search for God, and represents the Grandmother as a standard Christian woman who believes in her own virtue as much or more than she believes in the power of Christ. What she doesn’t realize is that she is in need of salvation every bit as much as the Misfit is, and only in the last seconds of her life, when she instinctively reaches out to the Misfit in pure love and kindness, does she really know what it means to be saved and thereby gains her standing in God’s graces.

           

O’Connor attempts to show us that being prim and proper does not necessarily make one spiritual, and, conversely, that being spiritual does not exclude one from a life of crime and antipathy. The Misfit, as a polar opposite to the Grandmother, is deeply spiritual but not a believer; he wishes he could believe in his Savior and know that God is going to take care of him in the end, but he cannot bring himself to accept faith, and he therefore surmises that without God, there is no point in compassion. 

           

“A Good Man” does make its point clear to the reader, and in O’Connor’s world, seemingly, there is no other way to get these characters to reveal their true emotions and identities than through violence. I find this hard to believe, however, and am vaguely disturbed that so many people would think it true. Violence does, indeed, alter our attitudes and behaviors, but does it really make known whom we are inside? I propose that possibly mere bad luck, not physical violence, reveals a person’s true character. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Notice that he did not say, “…in times of extreme violence.” In conclusion, I found that the violence in this story merely detracted from the basic concepts that O’Connor was trying to get across, and rather than engaging me in the ideas presented, the grotesqueness of it alienated me from the entire account.